Reading List 2008

I got a massive amount of writing done in 2008. That made it made it a strange year for reading. Early on in the year I appear to have had a ghosts and devils fixation. What was I thinking, reading Will Self, How the Dead Live and Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita back to back?

Between January and May I read and re-read a lot of chapters, articles and essays related to the texts I was working with in the Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams electronic literature project. Many books were harmed in the making of that work, some are pictured here, but few of those fragmentary readings are represented in the list below.



I had a great but short lived burst of short story reading in the spring while I was writing the postcard stories for the in absentia electronic literature project, but once that piece was launched I had to focus on finishing writing my first novel, Words the Dog Knows. It was a cold, wet summer, which was fine as I barely left my apartment. To get through the long days of writing toward impossibly short deadlines I soon realized that I couldn't read anything even remotely resembling anything I would ever write. So it was a summer of long post-colonial novels written by American women.

I thought I'd get back to my regular reading habits once Words the Dog Knows went to the printer, but despite a brief window were I got to catch up on a few books written by friends, most of my fall reading was muddled by travel. Between book tours, conferences, lectures and meetings I was on the road non-stop from mid-October to mid-November. All I can say is, Gulliver's Travels makes great sense on trains and airplanes.

My New Year's reading resolution: to read Don Quixote in it's entirety. Toward this end I have booked a one week vacation on a Cuban beach. The things I do for literature!

Here, from last to first, are books read in 2008:

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Salman Rushdie, ed., Best American Short Stories 2008

Jonathan Lenthem, Girl in a Landscape

Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile

Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science

Mariko & Jillian Tamaki, Skim

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

Emily Holton, Dear Canada Council / Our Starland

Liane Keightly, Seven Openings of the head

Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine

N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines

Joe Brainard, I Remember

Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

Cynthia Ozick, Trust

Maya Merrick, The Hole Show

Kate Pullinger, A Little Stranger

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Leni Zumas, Farewell Navigator

Jason Camlot, The Debaucher

Keri Hulme, The Bone People

Ha Jin, Waiting

Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

Claire Messud, The Hunters

Joy Williams, State of Grace

Julie Doucet, 365 Days

Barry Hannah, Geronimo Rex

Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

Steven Heighton, The Shadow Boxer

Michael Crummey, Flesh and Blood

Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr

Michale Hoeullebecq, The Elementary Particles

Rick Moody, Demonology

Goethe, Faust

Christopher Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Jeff Parker, The Back of the Line

Etgar Keret, Missing Kissinger

Raymond Carver, Short Cuts

Lorrie Moore, Like Life

Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Eva Figes, Light

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979

Maureen Adams, Shaggy Muses

Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever

Valerie Joy Kalynchuk, All Day Breakfast

Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonders

Flan O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus

Anya Ulinich, Petropolis

David McGimpsey, Sitcom

Jeff Parker, Ovenman

Will Self, How the Dead Live

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Mark Amerika, META/DATA

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